Once everyone knew what the family was. It was something natural and without a history - mum, dad and the kids. Divorce, women in the workforce, de facto relationships and the sexual liberation movements have fractured the old certainties. Nowadays there is more talk about the family than ever, even if no-one is quite sure what it is anymore. The making and breaking of the Australian family looks at the family in history. It traces the shift from the household economy of the late nineteenth century, to the child-centred nuclear family of the mid-twentieth century, to the recent proliferation of households. The book argues that the so-called traditional family was a quite recent creation, and that its fragmentation is obscured by new redefinitions of the family. The making and breaking of the Australian family addresses the changing experiences of childhood, parenting, home, neighbourhood, work, birth and sexuality. It examines the expansion of the market and the state, patterns of class mobilisation, the reconstruction of masculinity and femininity and the creative strategies of ordinary people in everyday life. This is a lively and accessible book, which will prove a valuable reference for students of history, sociology, women's studies and Australian studies, and will generate wide discussion amongst people concerned with family policy, welfare and contemporary social issues.

Looks at the family in history, tracing the shift from household economy, to the child-centred nuclear family, to the recent proliferation of households.

This ground-breaking book explores the experiences of gay men and their understanding of what it meant to be gay in the 20th Century: from when homosexuality was illegal though the less repressed but no less difficult eras of gay liberation and the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Examining the impact of feminism on ordinary Australian women, the author argues that the impact of feminism on women's lives has been significant, even though many of the women whose lives have changed because of its influence shun the term "feminist", or find feminism irrelevant.

From the start of the new Australian nation in 1901, to the use of the female contraceptive pill in 1961, Let’s Talk About Sex explores the ways sexuality has been constructed, understood and experienced in Australia. Far from being something hidden and private, this work brings sexuality out into the open, and explains why sex is of social, cultural, political and economic importance. Let’s Talk About Sex is an inclusive history, surveying multiple and interwoven forms of sexuality, desire, pleasure, regulation and resistance. It begins with the long Victorian period: the hidden desires of women and the “hydraulic” sexual needs of men, both in the cities and on the frontier. It moves across the decades, considering heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbians and nascent ideas about queer and sexual difference. Lisa Featherstone highlights the tensions of the ages: venereal disease, homophobia, birth control, rape and child sexual assault. She analyses the ways non-normative sexuality was constructed as evil and perverse, but also how men and women responded to this pathologising of their desires. Let’s Talk About Sex provides a fascinating account of sex, gender, age and race, across the formative years of Australian society.

This book, first published in 1999, explores the experience of private loss and grief after the two world wars.